Over the past year, a number of leading brands and retailers showed an increasing willingness to look beyond the current social auditing model and seek alternative means to better detect and address persistent worker rights abuses in their global supply chains. More and more brands and retailers agree that while monitoring is an essential and valuable tool but monitoring alone has proven ineffective in achieving positive change for workers at the factory level. When monitoring efforts are combined with other interventions focused on tackling some of the root causes of poor working conditions – by improving the ability of suppliers to better schedule their work and improve their quality and efficiency – working conditions appear to significantly improve.
ICS is working on a productive project to align factory human resources management practices with lean manufacturing concepts, which will result in sustainable improvements in working conditions. ICS has therefore partnered with the various local experts and leading brands in the areas of Engineering and Capacity building to offer a wide range of re-engineering and capacity building services to the vendors and suppliers. With the extensive experience in both social compliance and the respective manufacturing field, our engineering expert shall perform a thorough assessment on the entire operational system at the manufacturing facility and formulate a feasible proposal in re-engineering and building up the production capacity at the facility.
ICS believes that a more systemic approach that includes, but goes beyond factory monitoring, and a variety of "management systems" interventions aimed at eliminating the root causes of poor working conditions can address persistent worker rights abuses in supply chains.
